Mr. Mansel’s Fifth Lecture.—Notions and Principles.—Appearances and Realities.— Knowing and Being.—Germans and English. —Summary.
My dear Sir,
Mr. Mansel commences his fifth Lecture with an allusion to the well-known chapter on Necessity, in Butler’s ‘Analogy.’ He could not have referred to a passage in that book which illustrates better the assertion I made in my Third Letter, that Butler is pre-eminently a student of facts, and is indifferent, even to a fault, about the notions with which Sir William Hamilton and his Oxford disciple are chiefly conversant. The whole of that chapter might be summed up in some such language as this:—‘Establish your Notion of Necessity as satisfactorily as you please. I shall not dispute with you about it. That is no business of mine. I want to know what the facts of life are. This is one. I am treated and dealt with as if I were free. By that I stand.’
But though Butler was so heedless of notions, he was profoundly solicitous about principles. For these he was always seeking. These he found lying in the facts and under the facts. The carelessness of men in inquiring after these principles—their readiness to substitute for them merely fancies and speculations as to what might be—provoked him far more than any contradiction of his own conclusions. So little did he desire any one to take them for granted, that he would have liked people to write books without even enunciating their conclusions, leaving their readers to work them out for themselves.
It is Mr. Mansel’s misfortune that he cannot distinguish between a Principle and a Notion. He is therefore obliged to misrepresent—actually to invert —Butler’s lessons, whenever he comes in contact with them. So it is in this instance. He remarks, with self-evident truth, that Butler’s “observation has not settled the speculative difficulties involved in the problem of Liberty and Necessity.” He might have gone much further. He might have said, that it does not by itself settle the practical difficulties which are involved in that problem. It merely puts us in a method by which those practical difficulties may be removed, viz. by facing them, and not evading them; by meeting them, on whatever side they present themselves to us in action, and by believing that we may find a principle which will enable us to act rightly, be the notional perplexity ever so great. More than two centuries before Butler, Martin Luther had seen these difficulties from the other side. He had as deep a conviction that his will was enslaved, and that he was ‘treated and dealt with’ on that supposition, as Butler had that he was treated and dealt with on what seems to be the contrary supposition. He manfully cut through all scholastical webs which set at nought this great experience of his life; he proclaimed that he was a bondsman till God made him free. He would not have understood Butler; Butler would have utterly misunderstood him. But we cannot dispense with either; the facts of Luther are as much facts for us as the facts of Butler. We cannot seesaw between them, or complain of the vehemence with which either maintained his own position as one which it was life to hold, death to abandon. They might have been—at least we may be—less of deniers. God forbid that they should have been less of asserters! God forbid that any one should have persuaded them that what they asserted might not be true because there was so much to say on the other side! That they resisted all such arguments, was the sign that they were God’s heroes,—that they had renounced the world and the devil. And I am sure that we shall not do any work for Him, that we shall not maintain the vow of our baptism, if we listen to such language as the following, which is put forth under Butler’s authority,—which no one would more indignantly have repudiated than Butler.
“In Religion, in Morals, in our daily business, in the care of our lives, in the exercise of our senses, the rules which guide our practice cannot be reduced to principles which satisfy our reason.” (Page 135.) To which proposition I would oppose another. In Religion, in Morals, in our daily business, in the care of our lives, in the exercise of our senses, all rules will be unpractical, insincere, deceitful, promising much, performing nothing, unless they can be referred to some principle which our conscience, heart, reason, confess as fixed, unchangeable, eternal.
You will remember, surely, the opening chapter of the Analogy, concerning the imperishable I, who uses all senses, exerts all energies, puts forth all thoughts. See how Mr. Mansel introduces the same awful subject into his Lecture:—
“The very first Law of Thought, and through Thought, of all Consciousness, by which alone we are able to discern objects as such, or to distinguish them from one another, involves in its constitution a mystery and a doubt, which no effort of Philosophy has been able to penetrate:—How can the One be many, or the Many one? We are compelled to regard ourselves and our fellow-men as persons, and the visible world around us as made up of things: but what is personality, and what is reality, are questions which the wisest have tried to answer, and have tried in vain. Man, as a Person, is one, yet composed of many elements;—not identical with any one of them, nor yet with the aggregate of them all; and yet not separable from them by any effort of abstraction. Man is one in his thoughts, in his actions, and in the responsibilities which these involve. It is I who think, I who act, I who feel; yet I am not thought, nor action, nor feeling, nor a combination of thoughts and actions and feelings heaped together. Extension, and resistance, and shape, and the various sensible qualities, make up my conception of each individual body as such; yet the body is not its extension, nor its shape, nor its hardness, nor its colour, nor its smell, nor its taste; nor yet is it a mere aggregate of all these with no principle of unity among them. If these several parts constitute a single whole, the unity, as well as the plurality, must depend upon some principle which that whole contains: if they do not constitute a whole, the difficulty is removed but a single step; for the same question,—what constitutes individuality?—must be asked in relation to each separate part. The actual conception of every object, as such, involves the combination of the One and the Many; and that combination is practically made every time we think at all. But at the same time, no effort of reason is able to explain how such a relation is possible; or to satisfy the intellectual doubt which necessarily arises on the contemplation of it.”— (Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 135, 136.)
The former part of this passage contains that marvellous sentence about Reality to which I referred in a former letter. What is reality, is a question which the wisest have tried to answer, and tried in vain. So one would imagine! They have tried to reduce that which is, into a name, and they have not succeeded! With Reality, Personality is joined,—a melancholy fact, because all that is most powerful and effective in these Lectures has turned upon a denunciation of the Germans for losing sight of Personality either in themselves or in the Divine Being. And now we hear that what it is the wisest have tried in vain to ascertain. But the sentence I especially wish to notice is that concerning the I. Mr. Mansel perceives that it is I who think, I who act, and then proceeds to remark “that I am not thought, nor action, nor feelings, nor a combination of thoughts and actions and feelings heaped together.” Oh, if he had paused there one instant!—if he had allowed Butler to lead him into a solemn consideration of what is involved in that personality of mine, whether the wise can define it or not!—if he had not rushed into a wilderness of words about the combination of the One and the Many!—if he could have held fast to the One when he had found it!
For what is all this leading to? Is he trying to awaken in his Undergraduate hearers some sense of the mystery of that I which each one of them is and must be through ages upon ages? Is he bidding him ask himself, What am I? what shall I be? whence have I come? with whom have I to do? Is he thus cultivating the spirit of Butler, and teaching them how to profit by the study of him in their lecturerooms and in their chambers? Is he thus leading them to a Book which teaches us more of divine analogies, more of the way in which God awakens and meets these questionings, than Butler’s book ever can?
No! it is precisely to prevent all inquiries of this kind; precisely to show these young men that they must not trouble themselves about that which is; that they can have no acquaintance except with phenomena or appearances;—it is for this end that the Bampton Lectures were delivered; this is the moral which has been unfolding itself through all that have preceded, and which is now to burst upon us in its full magnificence. In the following passage we may be said to have reached the kernel of these discourses:—
“The conclusion which this condition of human consciousness almost irresistibly forces upon us, is one which equally exhibits the strength and the weakness of the human intellect. We are compelled to admit that the mind, in its contemplation of objects, is not the mere passive recipient of the things presented to it; but has an activity and a law of its own, by virtue of which it reacts upon the materials existing without, and moulds them into that form in which consciousness is capable of apprehending them. The existence of modes of thought, which we are compelled to accept as at the same time relatively ultimate and absolutely derived,—as limits beyond which we cannot penetrate, yet which themselves proclaim that there is a farther truth behind and above them,—suggests, as its obvious explanation, the hypothesis of a mind cramped by its own laws, and bewildered in the contemplation of its own forms. If the mind, in the act of consciousness, were merely blank and inert;—if the entire object of its contemplation came from without, and nothing from within;—no fact of consciousness would be inexplicable; for everything would present itself as it is. No reality would be suggested, beyond what is actually given: no question would be asked which is not already answered. For how can doubt arise, where there is no innate power in the mind to think beyond what is placed before it,—to react upon that which acts upon it? But upon the contrary supposition, all is regular, and the result such as might naturally be expected. If thought has laws of its own, it cannot by its own act go beyond them; yet the recognition of law, as a restraint, implies the existence of a sphere of liberty beyond. If the mind contributes its own element to the objects of consciousness, it must, in its first recognition of those objects, necessarily regard them as something complex, something generated partly from without and partly from within. Yet in that very recognition of the complex, as such, is implied an impossibility of attaining to the simple; for to resolve the composition is to destroy the very act of knowledge, and the relation by which consciousness is constituted. The object of which we are conscious is thus, to adopt the well-known language of the Kantian philosophy, a phenomenon, not a thing in itself;—a product, resulting from the twofold action of the thing apprehended, on the one side, and the faculties apprehending it, on the other. The perceiving subject alone, and the perceived object alone, are two unmeaning elements, which first acquire a significance in and by the act of their conjunction.
It is thus strictly in analogy with the method of God’s Providence in the constitution of man’s mental faculties, if we believe that, in Religion also, He has given us truths which are designed to be regulative, rather than speculative; intended, not to satisfy our reason, but to guide our practice; not to tell us what God is in His absolute nature, but how He wills that we should think of Him in our present finite state.”—(Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., pp. 141-143.)
I do not know why Mr. Mansel attributes the distinction between a phenomenon and a thing in itself to the Kantian philosophy. It has been a recognized distinction in every philosophy of the East or West for at least two thousand years; it has been felt to be the critical distinction in most. That we can only know Phenomena, was a dogma among the Greeks before the time of Socrates; that we cannot know Phenomena,—that only Being is the object of knowledge,—was the assertion of the most eminent thinkers of the opposing school. To ascertain what there is in us which takes account of Phenomena, what there is which demands the truth which is behind them and which they misrepresent, was the great enterprise of Plato, who cheerfully confessed that his practical master had preceded him in the inquiry, and that the best hope for any scientific result was to follow in his steps. Kant’s connection with the distinction, I have spoken of already. He had asserted, with more emphasis than all his predecessors, that the mere understanding in man converses only with phenomena; he felt himself compelled to assert also, with equal emphasis, that there must be an organ in man which converses with the thing itself, and that without this organ moral principle would be impossible for man. I am sorry to repeat myself so often upon this point, but I only do so when Mr. Mansel obliges me by repeating himself, or when, as in this case, he unintentionally misleads his readers by imputing to Kant specially what he has in common with half the world.
I use that last phrase deliberately, intending you to understand that this is a question which concerns the world just as much as the schools. The doctrine which Mr. Mansel has enunciated, that we must in all cases be contented with rules of conduct and must dispense with ’any principles that satisfy the intellect, is merely, as he confesses, the doctrine, in another form, that we have nothing to do except with reason, phenomena. He has himself given us an admirable series of tests for trying that doctrine by. I proceed to apply them one by one, in his own order. What I propose to show is—(1.) That all the experience of the most earnestly religious men in this country, those who have had the least to do with German Philosophy, who have hated it most, is against him. (2.) That the experience of all who are forming the minds of their children and pupils to practical morality is against him. (3.) That the experience of men occupied in common business is against him. (4.) That the experience respecting the care of our lives is against him. (5.) That the experience respecting the exercise of the senses is against him.
1. I begin, since Mr. Mansel begins, with the highest subject of all. I have spoken of the strong tendency, in the last age, among those in whose minds any thought had been awakened respecting the unseen world, to dwell upon their experiences and consciousnesses. That tendency was a protest and reaction against the prevalent habits of the eighteenth century; habits which were characteristic of its divines, and which found their full justification in a part of its philosophy. The evangelical teachers bore a clear and strong witness that the man must have that within him which the doctors only presented to him in formal lessons. Those who bore this witness spoke of themselves as asserters of ‘experimental’ or ‘vital’ religion.
But there was again a protest and reaction against this tendency. I mean, one proceeding not from those who undervalued it, but from those who had felt in themselves the full force of it. I mean one which did not merely aim at the hypocritical affectation of it, but which pointed out the dangers into which those were likely to fall who had passed through the spiritual processes which they recorded. For instance, the ablest of all the religious philosophers of the Calvinistical school, Jonathan Edwards, the writer who had attempted to expound most accurately the nature of the religious affections, was the man who most strongly asserted that consciousness never can be an ultimate end to the religious thinker. Nothing will satisfy him but being. He must rest in One who is; in One who is deeper than his consciousness; if he does not, that will only deceive him.
I refer to Edwards lest I should seem to be selecting a writer with whom I have any special sympathy. If he is too much of a formal philosopher for the illustration of my position, I could refer to a class of divines who had no pretensions of that kind, and yet who were continually warning their disciples not to trust ‘in their frames and feelings,’—to rest only in that which was fixed, settled, eternal, dependent on nothing in them, the only ground of all that they found in themselves. Any one the least conversant with religious literature will be familiar with such admonitions as these. I allude to them in those from whom they might least be expected, to show how impossible it has been for any serious man who has known most of phenomena, of the phenomena of his own mind, to be content with them; how all demands for action and suffering have driven him beyond these,—to seek a permanent rock and basis for his own being, even if he has not been forced by the feelings and convulsions of society to seek for one which should sustain all human beings. And this—not because he has sought any help from a ‘godless philosophy’—but because he has meditated on the Bible day and night. He has read in Psalm after Psalm how men in a horrible pit, or with the waterfloods going over them, found at last a ground beneath all their feelings, thoughts, consciousnesses. He has heard the voice which cried once in a poor sinful mortal, which sounded again from the Cross of the sinless One, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” still able to say, “Thou continuest holy, O thou worship of Israel.” He has read in the New Testament of a peace which we do not keep in our Consciousness, but which keeps us in the knowledge and love of God and of His Son Jesus Christ; he has found the beloved Disciple describing this as the privilege of the adult Christians, the fathers—that they knew Him who was from the beginning. And these are not only the discoveries of individuals. The whole course of religious thought for many years has been setting in this direction. Mr. Mansel may persuade some, that by the laws which God has imposed upon them, they cannot pass beyond the limits of their own consciousness,—they cannot know anything but phenomena. Those who understand what he means—who do not receive his decrees merely as an abracadabra which they may interpret as they like—will abandon their deepest consciousness, that they may not transcend it; will give up the faith which has sustained their souls, that they may not become infidels.
2. Some of the lessons which I have got from this religious history bear very clearly upon the next subject; but I will keep them apart so far as I can, that I may do justice to Mr. Mansel’s division. What has been the most practical teaching of morals in our time? What efforts have been made to deliver it from the formal, unpractical teaching of the last century? I should not scruple to draw my examples from any school. Take the writings of the most accomplished women of this age, who have given us the most valuable hints respecting the moral training of their own sex or of ours. Take the prudential lessons of Miss Edgeworth, the lessons on individual piety by Miss Hannah More, the lessons of Christian wisdom in social life by Miss Sewell or Miss Young.
In this quality they are alike. Their practical sense, their experience of actual men and women, leads them all to neglect mere rules of conduct, for the sake of discovering principles which mould and govern the character. They are always disobeying Mr. Mansel. Each, according to her own light, is seeking for that which is beneath appearances; each sees no way of delivering our sons and daughters from mere conventions that fail in every hour of trial, but by showing them that they must be in order to do.
3. Our daily business. Let us be as literal as possible in construing all these expressions. Can I be more so than if I take our daily business to be our trade? Then I say, that from Adam Smith downwards thoughtful men have been trying to cast off rules—most plausible rules, deduced from obvious phenomena—which had been wont to govern the operations of trade, and the conduct of statesmen respecting it, and to seek for principles deduced from the nature of things, ‘satisfying to the Reason.’
4. The care of our lives. This is a very general phrase. It means, I suppose, the health of our bodies. If that is so, it may point either to the care of our individual health, so suggesting the functions of the domestic physician, or the sanitary discipline of the country at large. Every step, I affirm, from barber-surgery to the period of Sir Benjamin Brodie and Mr. Lawrence, has been a step out of rules deduced from the phenomena of diseases into anatomical and physiological principles; these being discovered by the study of the actual human body, first in its healthy normal state, then under its morbid conditions. In like manner, every movement towards the improvement of dwellings, the removal of nuisances that have caused disease, the prevention of accidents, has been a step from rules grounded on the observation of phenomena into principles satisfactory to the reason. So much is this fact acknowledged by those who have the practical administration of affairs, that in case of any explosion in a mine, some scientific chemist, or geologist, is always sent down to examine and expound what principles have been neglected through the adherence to rules generalized from experience.
5. The exercise of the senses. Such exercises, I presume, as the observation of forms, which leads to the art of drawing, painting, sculpture; the observation of sounds, which leads to the art of music. Other exercises of the senses may be intended, but I choose these because they do not involve us in a cross division; we are less in danger of mixing this head with the second, which concerned morals. Then I affirm here also, that just as these exercises have become more orderly, more beneficial, more general, just in proportion as they have been taken more out of the dominion of artificial rules, and have been more connected with principles. I am not speaking of Germans who have elaborated a doctrine of Aesthetics, and have sought to discover the laws which our senses follow in their workings; I am not speaking of Winckelmann, or Lessing, or Goethe. Our own Burke,—who knew nothing of them, who was the great enemy of mere speculation, the laborious student of facts,—set the example, in his ‘Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful,’ of a search for grounds that would satisfy the reason in a subject which had been given up to the caprices of taste, or to traditional maxims.
Englishmen and Englishwomen have thus, in every department of thought to which Mr. Mansel has referred, been transgressing his canons, and moving in the line in which he would forbid them to move. And this, precisely because they have been sternly practical, because they could not be hindered from doing the thing that was to be done by any precepts of Philosophy.
The inhabitants of other lands have felt the same impulse, the same necessity. But as they have not our enviable faculty of speaking prose for a whole life without being aware of it, they have tried to investigate the seeming contradiction that while our direct consciousness is of that which presents itself to us, i.e. of appearances, all Science is and must be conversant with things in themselves, or (generally) with that which is. They have not indeed sought “to solve the mystery of knowing and being;” they have been at least as well aware as Mr. Mansel that it is a mystery. But they have said to themselves, ‘Since truth is involved in this question; since, if we are the victims of appearances, there can be no truth, or we are not to be hunters after it as Plato, Lessing, and Sir William Hamilton say we are, it is worthy of all investigation what this connection of Science and Being involves; what those eternal necessary laws and principles are which we must confess, though we cannot arrive at them through our consciousness, and though that cannot be the criterion of them.’ Out of this examination numerous results have followed. It led Schelling, in his later days, to a recognition of the Christian revelation and the Christian mysteries. Hegel is represented by his opponents and by one class of his followers, as having been led by it into pure Negation. Some of his disciples, on the other hand, maintain that they can accept just those assertions of our creed which Schleiermacher cast aside because they did not meet his consciousness; these commending themselves to the Reason which asks for that which is in itself, not merely for that which is relative to us.
Whether Hegel’s Logic must stop at the discovery of a void of Nothingness,—whether it only leaves a blank, which a Revelation of God would fill, whether it offers excuses for rejecting the actual appearance of the Son of God in the likeness of sinful flesh, or only declares that that likeness cannot be an adaptation to certain notions and conceptions of ours,—must have been a manifestation of the Eternal and Infinite Being as He is,—are questions which I am quite incompetent to settle, and which I do not think concern us greatly. I am quite sure that Mr. Mansel has not settled them in his Lectures. I am quite sure that he has done nothing to assist his hearers in settling them. He has taken a course which combines, it seems to me, the greatest possible amount of injustice to the persons he was attacking, with the greatest possible mischief to those who were hearing him. He has extracted passages from Hegel; from an orthodox representative of his school, Marheinecke; from that disciple of his who is notorious for his negative criticisms on the Gospels, Strauss. He knew that no one of these passages would convey any meaning to ninety-nine out of a hundred of the assembly which was gathered around him. He knew that some would be exceedingly pleased with themselves at their own freedom from such incomprehensible wickedness; that a great number would only be restrained by the decorum of a church from bursting into laughter. And this appeal to the very vulgarest feelings of young men is the Lecturer’s method of leading them to think with reverence of our Lord’s Incarnation—for that is the subject to which these extracts refer! If a similar experiment was made before a German audience,—I do not say upon any nonsense of mine, which would be at once dismissed as ignorant John-Bullism, but upon Mr. Mansel himself, with his great metaphysical acumen and undoubted knowledge,—if a body of students at Berlin or Heidelberg were entertained with excerpta from the Bampton Lectures, the Professor interspersing them with witticisms of his own about ‘profound riddles,’ ‘grandiloquent obscurity,’ ‘a literal translation being too ludicrous for the occasion’—might the result have been altogether different? And would not Mr. Mansel anticipate, as some compensation for the ill-bred contempt of the class generally, that a few of the more earnest might be driven, by the manifest injustice of that mode of exhibiting him, to an actual study of his work? I may doubt whether the addiction of a German student to Mr. Mansel would profit him much more than an addiction of English students to Hegel, Marheinecke, or Strauss. But I hint at the probable consequences of an unfair mode of treating one or the other.
I have said, however, and I repeat it, I do not feel myself in the least competent to pronounce between the Christian and the Atheistic Hegelians. For those who have leisure to investigate the subject it may have much interest. Our business is to take care that we are not cheated of what is necessary to our English faith and English practice, either by Germans or by the impugners of Germans. If what I have said in this Letter is true, Mr. Mansel is striking through them at us. He is robbing us of principles which we have found necessary for honest action, that he may throw us back upon rules which we have found utterly ineffectual. He wishes to shut us up in Consciousnesses, in which those who have had most of them have discovered that they cannot be shut up. In the following sentence we reach the climax of his doctrine.
Action, and not knowledge, is man’s destiny and duty in this life; and his highest principles, both in philosophy and in religion, have reference to this end. But it does not follow, on that account, that our representations are untrue, because they are imperfect. To assert that a representation is untrue, because it is relative to the mind of the receiver, is to overlook the fact that truth itself is nothing more than a relation. Truth and falsehood are not properties of things in themselves, but of our conceptions, and are tested, not by the comparison of conceptions with things in themselves, but with things as they are given in some other relation. My conception of an object of sense is true, when it corresponds to the characteristics of the object as I perceive it; but the perception itself is equally a relation, and equally implies the co-operation of human faculties. Truth in relation to no intelligence is a contradiction in terms: our highest conception of absolute truth is that of truth in relation to all intelligences. But of the consciousness of intelligences different from our own we have no knowledge, and can make no application. (Bampton Lectures, 2nd ed., p. 149.)
What does this mean? ‘Action is man’s duty and destiny in this life.’ Granted at once, ‘in this life,’ and, if Scripture is to be believed, in the life to come. ‘And his highest principles have reference to this end.’ Certainly; he must act: therefore he wants principles to determine how he shall act; true principles, that his actions may not be false. “But it does not follow on that account, that our representations are untrue because they are imperfect.” Who could have imagined that it followed, from action being our duty and destiny, ‘that our representations were untrue’? What has been said about representations? Of what are they representations? But they must be imperfect because action is our duty and destiny? Why must they be imperfect, and what must be imperfect? Here is a labyrinth of words leading apparently to no issue. Alas! it is leading to an issue. What is to be solved no one may be able to tell. But the solution is a solemn and tremendous one. ‘Truth itself is nothing more than a Relation. Truth and Falsehood are properties of our Conceptions.’ These are axioms; they do not require to be demonstrated; we are simply to receive them. May we at least consider them? Truth is a relation. To what? Between what or whom? Or is a Relation an ultimate Fact? Is a relation that which is? For this is what Englishmen have been wont to understand by Truth. They have supposed Truth to be the thing that is; Falsehood to be the thing that is not. They have believed that each one of us stands in a relation to the thing that is; that to break that relation is to speak or act a lie; that to break this relation is the sin of all sins, the misery of all miseries. This may be what Mr. Mansel intends, when he says, Truth and Falsehood are properties of our conceptions. I do not say that it is not. I am utterly in the dark. But I do say, with all emphasis, that if this is not what he intends; if he takes Truth to be not the end for which all other ends are to be sacrificed, and for which we are to live and die,—Falsehood not to be the curse and horror from which we are to fly at any risk to body or soul,—he is not in sympathy with whatever is sound in the heart of Englishmen; he is not teaching the lessons which the best English fathers demand that their children should be taught; he is not teaching them how they are to overcome the temptations of jobbers and gamblers; he is not teaching them how they may save their country from sinking into the most insincere and false of all countries on God’s earth, because the one which has most sense of the wickedness of insincerity and falsehood. A flatterer has said that an Englishman cannot frame his lips to a falsehood. If we believed the compliment, we should instantly prove its emptiness. The security for speaking truth or acting truth is the knowledge that the Spirit of Lies is at every moment seeking to make us forswear it; though what we forswear, or what we adhere to, if Truth and Falsehood are properties of our conceptions, I leave those who hold that opinion to explain.
This at least I am sure of; the most simple and earnest believers among our countrymen, while they will easily admit, on Mr. Mansel’s authority, that Hegel and the Germans are in some terrible manner undermining it, will say that this language respecting Truth at once lays the axe to the Gospel which they have received from our Lord’s Apostles, and which has been confirmed to them by their own experience. They have been used to take our Lord’s words literally, “I am the Truth;” and they have not learnt to consider Him a relation, or a property of their conceptions. They have believed that when He described the Comforter whom He would send from the Father, as the Spirit of Truth, He was not speaking of a relation, or of a property of their conceptions, but of a living and personal Teacher and Guide. They have believed that when He promised that that Spirit should guide them into all Truth, and when He afterwards interpreted those words by saying, “He shall take of mine, and show it to you, because all that the Father hath is mine,” He did not wish them to contemplate the Father and the Son as properties of their conceptions.
Nor can this be the faith which Mr. Mansel cherishes in his inmost heart. He has condemned other men for worshipping Abstractions. He has exclaimed with passion and vehemence, ‘These are thy gods, O Philosophy; these are the Metaphysics of Salvation.’ He set forth the personal life of Christ as opposed to these gods and these metaphysics in a passage of great rhetorical power.
It is for this that we are to obliterate from our faith that touching picture of the pure and holy Jesus, to which mankind for eighteen centuries has ever turned, with the devotion of man to God rendered only more heartfelt by the sympathy of love between man and man: which from generation to generation has nurtured the first seeds of religion in the opening mind of childhood, by the image of that Divine Child who was cradled in the manger of Bethlehem, and was subject to His parents at Nazareth: which has checked the fiery temptations of youth, by the thought of Him who was in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin; which has consoled the man struggling with poverty and sorrow, by the pathetic remembrance of Him who on earth had not where to lay His head: which has blended into one brotherhood the rich and the poor, the mighty and the mean among mankind, by the example of Him who, though He was rich, yet for our sakes became poor; though He was equal with God, yet took upon Him the form of a servant: which has given to the highest and purest precepts of morality an additional weight and sanction, by the records of that life in which the marvellous and the familiar are so strangely yet so perfectly united;—that life so natural in its human virtue, so supernatural in its divine power: which has robbed death of its sting, and the grave of its victory, by faith in Him who ‘was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification:’ which has ennobled and sanctified even the wants and weaknesses of our mortal nature, by the memory of Him who was an hungered in the wilderness and athirst upon the cross; who mourned over the destruction of Jerusalem, and wept at the grave of Lazarus.
Yes, the personal life of Jesus has, no doubt, been this to Christendom; is this, and far more than this, to hundreds of thousands who would not be able to speak of it in such words, or perhaps in any words at all. But what interpretation has Christendom given of the exceeding worth and preciousness of this life to us? It has said that He of whom we read in the Gospels is the Head of a body, of which we are members; that this Life is that from which our life is derived. It has said that this is the life which was with the Father, and has been manifested to us. The humble Christian who has accepted the doctrine of the God-Manhood of Christ, as our creeds set it forth, has not been careful to prove how many men were not blessed by that Life, how many men were not within the scope of that divine fullness. He has been sure that he was not worthy to partake of it. He has been sure only that to know the God in whom this Life dwells is to have Eternal Life. He has said in his weakness and nothingness, when the wickedness of his heels was compassing him about,— ‘When I wake up, I shall find that this is the God I have waited for; I shall behold Him, and not another. I believe that He who is Truth and no Lie, has revealed Himself to me in the Person of His only-begotten Son,—not some poor imperfect representation of Himself, such as He pleases I should think to be like Him. Therefore I can trust Him, knowing what He is; therefore I can keep myself from idols, and can learn to hate all false ways as He hates them.’
Let us consider then what we have been learning from this Lecture.
(1.) It has been a great point with Mr. Mansel to maintain that the laws which regulate religious thought, must be the same with those which regulate our thoughts on all other subjects. The point is established. In all other subjects the most serious and practical people have discovered a necessity for transgressing the limits which he would impose upon thought. From no ambition of being sublime; from no admiration of foreigners; from the obligation to act; from the determination not to let theory interfere with action, the necessity has arisen. (2) He has taken great pains to show us that our finite intellects can never be the measure of the Infinite. The maxim is established; it is one to start from. And because the finite cannot be the measure of the infinite,—because our conceptions can never be the measure of that which is,—because those conceptions will lead us only to the apparent, therefore we need that which shall be the measure of our finite thought, which shall lift us above our conceptions, which shall bring us into contact with that which our conceptions are feeling after, but cannot reach. (3) He has shown us that a mere negation, such as is expressed by the word Infinite, can never content a creature who needs what is positive, living, personal, to rest upon. We heartily sympathize with the observation. For Infinite, let us substitute the word which is so dear to St. Paul and St. John. Let us speak of the Eternal. Let us distinguish, with St. Paul, between the things that are seen, which are temporal, and the things that are not seen, which are eternal. Let us speak not of knowing the Infinite, but of knowing Him who is from the beginning, Him who was and is and is to come. So we shall be in exact harmony with the teaching of Scripture; so shall we avoid mere speculations about that which is at a distance from us; so we shall be brought to ask for that which is the ground of our own being; for that Rock on which we and the Universe are resting. (4) Mr. Mansel quotes a beautiful passage from Hooker in this Lecture, one from Augustine in the next, both of which indicate what deep awe they had of the Being in whom they were living and moving and having their being; how, as one worthy to stand beside them, our holy and admirable Leighton, expresses it, ‘The posts of the door of the spiritual temple moved at the voice of Him that cried.’ Such passages might have been multiplied indefinitely; none would have been more to the purpose than the well-known soliloquy in the fifth book of Hooker respecting the Eucharist. They should be read and reread, that we may feel how true the saying is, that ‘those who know most of God, and trust most in His love, will fear Him most;’ how impossible it is to cultivate the fear of God in any sense in which the Scriptures speak of it, if we regard Him as a distant, unknown Being whose Nature and Character we cannot enter into, or partake of; how certainly, if we entertain that opinion, our fear will be taught us by the precepts of men; how certainly it will alternate between the sentiment of slaves towards a cruel Taskmaster, and that of idolaters who have made their own Gods, and therefore feel—as the Greeks did about their heroes, as the Italians do about their saints—that they have a right to scold them and scoff at them; how truly the words of Job express the whole difference between the mere traditional homage, and that which comes from actual discovery. “I have heard of Thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye seeth Thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (5) Mr. Mansel offers many admonitions to his youthful auditors, concerning the dangers to which they are exposed from the assaults of false Philosophy. The warnings are worthy of all heed. You and I have need to lay them deeply to heart. Leighton, in more than one passage of his lectures to the Edinburgh students, warns them that the philosophers, though they occasionally use phrases which point to something higher, would, in general, make them content with their own narrow and limited thoughts, would hinder them from thirsting for the Eternal Good which alone can satisfy them. I am convinced that this is the danger of which young men most need to be warned. While they are seeking for the good,—for the Eternal Truth,—they may commit thousands of mistakes; their mistakes will become part of their discipline. When they suppose it is impossible for man to rise above himself, they inevitably become poor and grovelling in their aims, self-conceited, contemptuous. (6) In one passage, Mr. Mansel speaks of young students parting ‘with their wedding-garment of Faith.’ Of course he does not use such language lightly, or merely as a phrase of rhetoric. The wedding-garment in Scripture describes what is most deep and real—our union to Christ, our adoption to be members of His body. Surely a young man who has been told when he was a child, that this is his state, cannot be too earnestly exhorted not to deem lightly of it. To preserve his wedding-garment, he need not shut himself out from the world, or any of its thoughts, experiences, temptations; it will preserve him amidst them. But if he forgets that he is united to Christ in order that he may seek the things that are above, where Christ sitteth at the right-hand of God—the ‘eternal things,’ ‘the knowledge of Him who has called him to glory and virtue,’—is not the garment cast off? is not the marriage-vow broken?
Faithfully yours, F. D. M.
P.S. One of the passages in Leighton to which I referred occurs in Prelection xvii., p. 121 (Scholefield): “Eatenus quidem probandi sunt (philosophi), quod ab externis animum ad se revocant; sed in hoc deficiunt, quod intro ad se reversum altius non dirigunt nec ut supra se ascendat, docent.”